Nature Fails New Technology

A research showed that babies aged 12 to 18 months who were exposed to learn new words by means of Interactive Learning DVDs and parents didn’t did well as compared to those who were taught by parents alone!

With her colleagues, DeLoache had 72 infants, ages 12 to 18 months, to one of four groups:

Group 1: A video with interaction group, in which the child & parent watched the DVD together at least 5 times/week over a four-week duration.

Group 2: A video without interaction group, in which the children watched the video alone for the same exposure period as the kids who watched with their parent.

Group 3: A parent-teaching group, in which the parents were given a list of the 25 words featured on the video and told to try to teach their child as many words as possible in ”whatever way seems natural to them.”

Group 4: A comparison group in which the children had no intervention.

Researchers visited the homes of the first three groups three times, visiting to see if the protocol was followed. Children were tested after four weeks to see how many target words they knew.

The parent teaching group did the best, with those children getting nearly 50% of the target words correct, the researchers found.

Bottom line: No Matter how much we advance in technology the best a child can get is from their parents not by new teaching interactive methods!

Burhan Ahmed, MD, MACP, MSc is currently Editor-in-Chief at Medicalopedia.org. He completed his residency from Michigan State University in 2015. He has has 14 publications to his name. He is pursuing career in dermatology and practices at Clinique de Dermatology.